Month: October 2012

In a thunderclap of synchronicity, two titans of the Skeptical (capital S) world, the likes of whom we may never see again, passed away on the same day last weekend. Paul Kurtz, 86, and Leon Jaroff, 85 — co-founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal — crossed into the sweet hereafter together on Saturday from 367 miles apart in New York. Perhaps no two public figures have done more to stigmatize UFOs in the contemporary mind than these champions of secular humanism.

"Abracadabra! Hocus-pocus! Shazam!" Paul Kurtz and Leon Jaroff strived for decades to make UFOs disappear from the national radar screen/CREDIT: mi9.com

Founded in 1976, CSICOP, known now simply as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, never met a UFO that wasn’t Venus, swamp gas, a hoax, or induced by psilocybin. Every bit as doctrinaire as the religious fundamentalism it rightfully hammered, CSICOP was founded on the belief that nothing outside the five known senses can exist. Indiscriminate in its assault on The Great Taboo, CSI today continues to ignore radar data and pilot testimony, and dumps UFOs into the same laundry basket as tarot cards, creationism and phrenology. It’s an enduring stench that holds powerful sway.

“We are,” philosophy professor Kurtz once immodestly proclaimed, “the heroic defenders of science and reason. Our kind of saints are magicians and comedians. They show by sleight of hand how you can deceive.”

A celebration of magicians and comedians and masters of deception — now there’s an appropriate scientific legacy. Rather than give an honest appraisal of data that might contradict CSI’s rigid profile of the known world, the omniscient Kurtz preferred to relegate the UFO phenomenon to the latest post-modern wrinkle in self-delusion. For Kurtz, the 1997 Heaven’s Gate UFO suicide cult was manna from, um, heaven:

“UFOlogy is the mythology of the space age. Rather than angels,” he stated, “we now have…extraterrestrials. It is the product of the creative imagination. It serves a poetic and existential function. It seeks to give man deeper roots and bearings in the universe. It is an expression of our hunger for mystery…our hope for transcendental meaning. The gods of Mt. Olympus have been transformed into space voyagers, transporting us by our dreams to other realms.”

In the pre-digital age of media consolidation, Kurtz was the mainstream go-to guy whenever the talking heads needed an alternative voice to mitigate snake-oil peddlers selling miracle cures. To be sure, Kurtz was usually on firm ground in that arena. But Leon Jaroff was the media, which made his role in the UFO quarantine even more significant.

Managing editor of Discover magazine and the science editor for Time magazine — 40-plus cover stories to his credit — Jaroff was the powerful arbiter of what million of Americans regularly consumed from the frontiers of exploration. When he wasn’t ignoring The Great Taboo altogether, Jaroff was smug and patronizing. In a 2002 piece for Time built around a Swiss study of dopamine on perception, he told readers he had UFOs and their ilk all mapped out.

“I’ve ridiculed believers in Therapeutic Touch and Alien Abductions, and made light of those who insist that UFOs are visitors from other worlds,” Jaroff wrote. “Now I’m feeling a little guilty. It turns out that these poor souls, as well as the millions who hold similar beliefs, really can’t help themselves. It’s their body chemistry that makes them so gullible.”

That’s gotta be reassuring to residents of the Stephenville, Tex., region who were gullible enough to believe that 2.8 million radar hits from FAA and National Weather Service records corroborated their dramatic UFO sighting in 2008 — not to mention the F-16s the military initially declared weren’t there. As for the poor souls who never insisted that UFOs were visitors from other worlds and appealed merely for rigorous investigation without bias, Jaroff had nothing to offer that crowd.

At any rate, as the venerated print platforms of the 20th century continue to collapse into online ghosts of themselves, so too does their oracular clout. This is not necessarily a good thing. But when it came to confronting what will one day be regarded as the great challenge of the age, our institutions deferred to agenda-driven ideologues like Kurtz and Jaroff. So here’s a two-word sendoff to two major American opinion-shapers who enabled our long deep sleep under the pretense of reason: Mission accomplished.

So after 10 years of legal wrangling, a UFO-obsessed Brit finally gets a reprieve and will not be shipped off to America to stand trial — what a relief. Let’s hope our Anglo allies have short memories. It’s easier to understand how this one began than how it ended.

America's prosecution of UK hacker Gary McKinnon backfired and stoked an extradition controversy into a showcase for British nationalism/CREDIT: thedisclosureproject-steelmagnolia

In March 2002, less than a year after 9/11, a loner named Gary McKinnon, on a cyberquest for the X-Files, gets arrested in London for hacking into restricted government systems. He’s accused of deleting and destroying reams of data as well as crashing 2,000 computers in one military district for 24 hours. Using the handle “Solo,” he leaves taunting messages, one of which correctly declares, “Your security is crap.” The Justice Department claims he caused nearly $1 million in damages, and one prosecutor calls him “the biggest military hack of all time.”

Of course, this all occurs years before China takes us to school and begins targeting everything from U.S. command-and-control systems to satellite technology to natural gas pipelines. Using a simple low-tech program that scans for default passwords, McKinnon is a piker who exposes the most basic vulnerabilities in U.S. firewalls. And all he gets for his troubles — the most interesting thing, anyhow — is an unsubstantiated claim of proof that NASA scrubs UFO pix from official photos at Johnson Space Center.

Brits were already suspicious of America’s black-hole rendition policies for professed enemies during the early double-aughts, but when McKinnon was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome with suicidal tendencies, the UK came together in a way it hasn’t seen since Hitler’s buzz bombs. With the U.S. refusing to make adjustments, Labour, Tories, Greens and all other manner of organized political thought rallied behind McKinnon’s bid to face justice at home. Celebs Julie Christie, Sting, Nick Hornby went public against the Yanks, David Gilmour, Bob Geldoff and Chrissie Hynde cut a protest song, and a lopsided Anglo-American extradition treaty signed in 2003 (“inadequate and unfair,” proclaimed former Archbishop of Canterbury assistant Terry Waite) went up for reassessment. Following the High Court’s deferential review of that pact, London Mayor Boris Johnson accused judges of “dog-like grovelling to America,” their ruling “one of the most protoplasmic acts of self-abasement since Suez.”

British Home Secretary Theresa May finally put an end to the travesty last week by announcing her office wouldn’t extradite homeboy, due in large part to its concerns over McKinnon’s mental state. There wasn’t much left for Washington to say after this 10-year wash. “The United States is disappointed by the decision to deny Gary McKinnon’s extradition to face long overdue justice in the United States,” volunteered the State Department. “We are examining the details of the decision.”

Too bad we’ve been deprived of a show trial to give China a look at how tough we can be in this new age of cyberwar. But all things considered, “we” got off lucky. McKinnon didn’t produce any tangible clandestine UFO data, and the controversial extradition accord remains intact. The best thing that can happen now is if no one on this side of the Atlantic mentions Gary McKinnon’s name again.

Huzzahs to Newsweek editor-in-chief Tina Brown for the audacious Oct. 15 cover story, “Heaven Is Real.” The magazine’s circulation and revenues may be locked in a mortal tailspin, but Brown’s instincts for zigging where others zag are resilient. That lack of predictability has been a career trademark at venues like Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Talk magazine, and The Daily Beast. And here we are again.

Last week’s cover excerpted a book by Harvard neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, who emerged from a week-long coma in 2008 with an afterlife story that would appear to violate the tolerance threshold of the standard U.S. weekly news magazine. For instance:

“A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above,” Alexander writes, “and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had come to make this noise — that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.”

Critics are clobbering him for it, naturally, but Alexander eschewed the professional risks in order to tell Newsweek readers what he says made this near-death experience unique: “As far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.”

That’s interesting. But how to corroborate the interior experience? De Void readers already know (precognition) where this is headed.

Newsweek illustrated the “Heaven” article with three previous God-and-the-hereafter cover themes, and referred to its “numerous covers about religion, God, and that search.” Which is fine, except the archives for UFO data are orders of magnitude larger than for evidence of Alexander’s NDE. And yet, for all of its aspirations for going off the MSM rez and becoming an industry iconoclast, Tina Brown’s dying weekly has so far been incapable of applying any journalistic standards to The Great Taboo.

Seriously, how choosy can she be at this point? Over the summer, Brown felt compelled to counter a rumor of Newsweek’s allegedly imminent dissolution into the digital-only realm with a memo accusing critics of “scaremongering.” But last month, writing for USA Today and citing Newsweek’s “desperate and operatic struggle” for solvency, columnist Michael Wolff accused Brown of “being blind to the realities of the new [digital] world” and wagering on “old-media tricks” to sustain “the kind of zeitgeist-shaping, buzz-creating, cocktail-party-fueling package that the media has, for so long, been built around — part craft, part culture, part snobbery.”

Memo to Tina Brown: If the ship’s going down, make the obituary-writers eat that “snobbery” part and assign some resources to a topic that not a single one of those glib carrion birds has the stones to touch. Read UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry (Swords/Powell) and UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record (Kean). Surprise the entire Fourth Estate with honest journalism on The Great Taboo. Give ’em something to really hate.

We’ll find the water on Mars. Massive quantities. And probably fossils. Oil, too, more than likely. And who knows what else. And one supposes it’ll all be pretty cool. Especially now with the billion-dollar Curiosity rover tooling around Gale Crater. But I won’t be paying attention. Because my expectation bar is, like, through the roof.

Can you spot the artificial fragment on Mars? Curiosity's managers paused this week to consider the case, but next to the hominids and reptoids and humanoids, there's only one word for this photo: BORE-ring!/CREDIT: NASA-JPL

That’s on account of the Mars Anomaly Research Society website. It’s run by Andrew Basiago, who’s already been there numerous times, back in the 1980s, via a secret CIA teleportation program. The Agency was dumb enough to think it could trust him with its darkest secret; he describes himself as a “planetary-level whistle blower.”

Basiago discovered life on Mars a long time ago. Using photos from multiple NASA orbiters and rovers, he shows the whole gallery, from Martian forests to artificially constructed, sewage-sized glass tubes. He’s discovered hominids and humanoids — and yes, folks, there IS a difference. In fact, Basiago found a photo of a humanoid being devoured by a “reptoid” in Columbia Crater. This required true skills of discernment because the feeding frenzy was camouflaged amid a rocky desert. The Discoverer of Life on Mars quotes himself in the third person:

“’This finding will test the limits of the Prime Directive,’ the discoverer of life on Mars observed. ‘Should we let humanoids perish as the food for reptoids on Mars to preserve the balance of nature there, or should we intervene to save humanoids from predation because it is the ethical thing to do?’”

Basiago raises a damn good question. This is not a spoof or a joke because he’s been on George Noory’s “Coast To Coast AM.”

Curiosity’s touchdown dust had barely settled on the lander in August when images of purported UFOs started circulating on the Net. But so what, who cares? Little white dots in the sky? Please — we’ve already seen pix of humanoids and hominids and reptoids.

A few days ago, Curiosity’s mission managers briefly suspended the crawler’s itinerary when its camera grabbed an image of a bright shiny object that clearly wasn’t natural. Some people wondered: Was this Curiosity’s own debris, or evidence of an ET artifact? But again — shut up, who cares. Would you rather see discarded tinfoil from a pharoah’s chewing gum, or the pharoah himself?

Basiago (who has also found images of a Martian pharoah) has his thumb on the throbbing pulse of America right now. He knows what we want. “In 2016,” he writes on his website, “Andrew D. Basiago will be a candidate for President of the United States under the banner Andy 2016 – A Time for Truth.”

Imagine you’re the first officer on a jumbo jet and you witnessed a UFO encounter that could’ve ended catastrophically. You never leaked word one to management and you carried the thing around in your head for 16 years. Finally, upon retirement, you summon the nerve to contact the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena and fill out an incident report. And even then, you insist on complete anonymity, not only for yourself but for your former employer as well.

Air Traffic Controller: "TWA 517, do you want to report a UFO? Over. TWA 517, do you want to report a UFO? Over." TWA Pilot: "Negative. We don't want to report." Air Traffic Controller: "AirEast 31, do you wish to report a UFO? Over." AirEast Pilot: "Negative. We don't want to report one of those, either." -- Close Encounters of the Third Kind/CREDIT: pyxurz.blogspot.com

That’s true fear, man. It’s the American way, like talking publicly about “making whoopee” in the Fifties. Yet, a dozen years into the 21st century, where commercial pilots in France and the UK are free to file UFO reports without worrying about getting canned, it’s still a 1977 “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” opening-dialogue bluesfest here in the States.

In July, NARCAP director Dr. Richard Haines helped relieve the aforementioned pilot’s load by publishing his report, in addition to transcripts of a followup interview. It’s an instructive post because, unlike so many people startled by UFOs, the first officer is a trained observer with a keen eye for detail. And as a former NASA research scientist and aviation safety expert, Haines’ line of inquiry presents a textbook case for eliminating prosaic explanations and wringing whatever data (approximate size, approximate speed) can still be harvested from a such a cold-case anecdote.

This one went down on Sept. 27, 1996, shortly after midnight, when a DC-10 cargo jet took off from LAX, destination Newark. The witness — let’s call him Shotgun — is sitting in the right seat, beside the captain. They’re between 6,000 and 7,000 feet when it happened.

De Void won’t go into details here, they’re all in the report at narcap.org. Worth mentioning, however, was the UFO’s abrupt and disconcerting nature, the way it appeared without warning, straight ahead, like landing lights, giving every indication of an imminent collision. A less experienced pilot might’ve dangerously over-corrected. Also worth mentioning is Shotgun’s meticulous chronology. As Haines interjects, “One can almost follow the thought patterns of pilots who are struggling with an idea that is previously thought to be impossible.”

Shotgun radioed air traffic control immediately after the incident to ask if radar had painted anything else in the immediate vicinity. The tower replied no, then asked why, to which Shotgun responded, “Disregard.” He also noted, fortunately, there had been no onboard systems malfunctions.

In Haines’ Q&A, we find Shotgun questioning the nature of reality. “If we have stealth, then they most definitely have stealth,” he says. “It must all be a matter of whether they want to be seen or not or [if] they care if they are seen or not. This brings up a question I have always had, why did they bother to make their presence known to us? Had they not turned on those lights we most assuredly would never have known about them. What purpose did it serve for us to know they were there, or were they just playing with us?”

Haines obviously can’t answer that one. But Shotgun makes it clear he fears being in a culture in denial — particularly when it involves flight safety — far more than he feared what he saw in the sky that night.

“This atmosphere of being afraid of the damage to your reputation for making a report has to change, but it is going to require a truly open effort and public stance by the powers to be, in either the government, or military, or both,” he says. “When I say public, I mean an unambiguous public announcement that reports are now wanted, desired, and will be handled in a professional manner. If this never happens, the stigma will never be removed.”

In Walter Cronkite’s 1966 suck-up documentary for the Air Force — “UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?”— CBS took viewers to the NORAD nerve center in Colorado, where a reporter asked Capt. Gary Reese if UFOs can avoid radar detection. “So far as we know,” replied the robotic Air Force officer, “all flying objects are composed of materials which are aerodynamic and which do have a reflective surface upon which radar waves can be bounced. It’s possible there are other types of material; however, I doubt it.”

Pressed for more details about eyewitness reports, Reese fibbed, “These sightings have never been substantiated and could not be translated into hard radar return figures.”

"Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions and cries out to be surpassed and rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this." — sociologist Max Weber /CREDIT: kennethavery.hubpages.com

That was half a century ago, when stealth technology was a fantasy. And nevermind that radar records corroborating eyewitness UFO accounts began rolling in as early as 1947 and are too numerous to itemize here. Last week, during NPR’s discussion of James Bond’s hi-tech gizmos on “Morning Edition,” De Void got to thinking about how much farther we might have extended the boundaries of science today had The Great Taboo been subjected to truly professional evaluation.

In that particular exchange, Hayden Planetarium director (and UFO “skeptic” ) Neil deGrasse Tyson is discussing the invisibility of Bond’s cinematic Aston Martin. “There are invisible things in the world, and they’re called transparent. OK?” Tyson goes on to say “Glass is essentially invisible to the light that we see with our eyes. It’s not invisible to other forms of light, like ultraviolet or infrared. The cameras on the other side of the car have to look at every possible angle that you would be viewing the car, from your side. And we haven’t figured out really how to do that yet.”

The chatter evoked some interviews De Void conducted in 2002 with a couple of USAF veterans belonging to the 9th Fighter Squadron’s 49th Fighter-Bomber Wing in Misawa, Japan. Their window into the bizarre opened during a major technology push during 1949-50, when P-51 prop jobs were being replaced with F-80 jet fighters. And what test pilots Bud Evans and Clyde Good reported was so audacious, you almost have to laugh.

Evans, who would later train as a civilian astronaut on the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, told of how two pilots converging on what they thought was a gunnery target — a 30-foot long, 8-foot tall banner with bulls-eye markings, towed by a P-51 trailing an 800-foot cable — were baffled to find only a rectangle drifting in mid-air. They flanked the object, which they estimated to be three times the size of a conventional target, and could see each other’s plane silhouettes through what appeared to be translucent glass. Ground radar also tracked the blip, which then bolted forward and vertical and out of sight.

Evans was later scrambled when base radar spotted another bogey, which Evans’ wingman described as a thin, broad, flying rectangle that vanished as soon as he got close enough for a good look.

Evans and Good, a former lieutenant colonel, were both in attendance when this same phenomenon manifested again. And talk about intent — it happened just as the squadron had assembled, complete with color guard, along a runway to receive top brass flying in for a base inspection.

“It was coming in pretty slow, and at first, we all thought it was a tow target, but we couldn’t see what was holding it up,” recalled Good. “So I’m looking for its power source, and there were no props, no jet engines, no visible means of propulsion, and it doesn’t make a sound. But it was definitely under the control of somebody or something, because then it pulled straight up, like a bat out of hell, and took off. Just disappeared.”

Both veterans said eyewitnesses were ordered to clam up about the incidents at Misawa. This was more than 60 years ago. And it’s been more than 40 years since our government officially quit collecting UFO data. Imagine what we might’ve learned over these lost decades had we kept our eyes and our minds open.

So it was refreshing to see what astronomer Derrick Pitts of the Franklin Institute Science Museum told The Huffington Post over the weekend. “Let’s find out, let’s take a look at it, because here we have a phenomenon that causes a tremendous amount of interest,” says Pitts, who also publicly endorsed Leslie Kean’s no-nonsense UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. “Why not try to understand what it is?”

Pitts’ reasoning is worth a read because, unlike Tyson and practically everyone else in mainstream science, his perspectives on UFOs are informed and logical. Attention NPR or anyone else looking to set a higher bar: Get these two scientists on the same stage. This is how a national conversation starts.

Last Friday, ABC’s Good Morning America decided to do a Great Taboo story on the cheap. It aired a piece by east Texas affiliate KLTV about an alleged UFO captured by Google Earth cameras in tiny Jacksonville, Tex. It was a whimsical little jellybean that cost nothing to produce. The accompanying ABC blog post indicated another similar UFO had been located on Google Earth in New Mexico.

ABC's Good Morning America made a whoop-de-doo about this lens flare, which led to a worldwide blogosphere phenomenon/CREDIT: Google Earth

The dual-UFO story went viral, from The Daily Mail in London to The Pakistan Daily Times. Although critics tendered lens flare as a possible explanation, one “UFO expert” declared “Without question, this is a legitimate craft. It is not a reflection or anything like that. That’s nonsense. I’m actually quite surprised that this is not getting more media attention.”

Actually, it’s hard to imagine how the thing got this far. Within minutes of being shown the Google images, our Herald-Tribune photo chief Mike Lang noodled around the Google Street View imagery and found yet another lens flare “UFO” in Texas — only, it was on the ground, not in the air.

Hey look! On the ground -- it's another pink UFO! This lens flare, complete with parabolic distortion, turns up in Tyler, Tex., just north of Jacksonville/CREDIT: Google Earth

Same damn thing. Pink, too. And it took just a few minutes to find it.

The vacuous GMA segment ran one minute 46 seconds. Granted, not a long time. But if ABC wanted to give its five million viewers a legitimate Texas UFO story they’d never heard before, here’s the script:

“Four and a half years after an unidentified flying object without a transponder closed in on the no-fly zone around President Bush’s ‘Western White House’ in Crawford, Texas, the U.S. Air Force has yet to release radar records of that event.

“The UFO, described by eyewitnesses as a massive solid object illuminated with lights resembling welder’s arcs, was tracked by Federal Aviation Administration and National Weather Service radar as it headed on a southeast bearing out of Stephenville, Texas. The incident, which occurred during the early evening of Jan. 8, 2008, was reconstructed by the Mutual UFO Network using federal records released under the Freedom of Information Act.

“Shortly after the UFO appeared over Stephenville, witnesses reported seeing jet fighters on afterburners in the vicinity. A spokesman for an air base near Fort Worth initially stated the military had no planes in the area that night. But less than two weeks later, after MUFON filed its FOIA requests for radar data to several federal agencies, the Air Force conceded it had 10 F-16 jet fighters operating in the region on the night in question. The FAA/National Weather Service records plotted 2.8 million radar returns during the UFO event. Those records not only corroborated eyewitness accounts of the UFO’s flight direction, they also tracked the F-16 flight paths as well. As the UFO prepared to enter restricted air space over the Bush ranch, no jet interceptors were in the vicinity.

“Unlike the FAA and the National Weather Service, the military told MUFON in 2008 that it had destroyed the radar records in question. This is the first time ABC News has bothered to acquire a no-comment from the Pentagon. Coming up — global reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘Total Recall’ autobiography …”

Come on, ABC. This takes less than 1:46 to read. And it doesn’t cost a dime.